Life: A Love Story

Title: Life: A Love Story
Author: Elizabeth Berg
Published: March 17, 2026 by Random House
Format: Kindle, 208 Pages
Genre: Women's Fiction

Blurb: Florence “Flo” Greene is nearing the end of her life, and she decides to leave her house and an account of her life for Ruthie, the younger woman who grew up next door, moved away, and still is like a surrogate daughter. As Flo writes to Ruthie about the meaning of beloved things in her home and about events in her past, she also tries new adventures of her own. She intervenes in the lives of friends in her neighborhood.

Flo's project has been to encourage Teresa, a wise but unconfident woman, to open her heart to romance. Flo goes to the library to get advice from Mimi, a librarian. She encourages Ruthie, who is contemplating divorce, to try again with her husband, by sharing a startling secret long buried about Flo’s own seemingly perfect husband and marriage.

In her final weeks, Flo leaves an indelible mark on others, as this moving novel celebrates life, change, and ways to discover new happiness, friendship, and love.

My Opinion: I first discovered Elizabeth Berg through her Arthur Truluv novels, and I still think about Arthur, Maddy, and Lucille as if they were old friends I occasionally catch sight of. Not every book can recreate that particular magic, but I opened this novel hoping for that same quiet, heart-forward resonance.

This novel unfolds through correspondence and small side stories, a structure that feels both intimate and slightly old-fashioned in the best way. I understand why some readers compare it to ‘The Correspondent’ by Virginia Evans, though for me, it would be hard to match the presence of Sybil Van Antwerp. Then add in shades of ‘The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning’, you start to see what Berg is weaving together: reflections on faith, the wisdom that comes with age, the tenderness of found family, and the complicated grace of preparing for the end of life.

It’s a quick read, but not a light one. It will land differently depending on where you are in your own journey. Flo’s words—sometimes funny, sometimes piercing, sometimes so simple they sneak up on you—have a way of lodging themselves in your mind. Days later, one of her life lessons might bubble up unexpectedly, and you’ll pause, trying to remember where you heard it, before giving a small smile when you realize it was Flo whispering back to you.

And yes, there’s laughter. Berg always gives us that. But she also gives us the tears, the kind that come from recognizing something true about love, loss, or the strange, beautiful mess of being human.

Life: A Love Story may not be another Arthur Truluv, but it carries its own quiet, gentle, wise, and full-of-heart power.

Book of Forbidden Words

Title: Book of Forbidden Words
Author: Louise Fein
Published: February 17, 2026 by William Morrow Paperbacks
Format: Paperback, 384 Pages
Genre: Historical Fiction

Blurb: 1552, The print­ing press is quickly spreading new ideas across Europe, threatening the power of church and state and unleashing a wave of book burning and heretic hunting. When frightened ex-nun Lysbette Angiers arrives at Charlotte Guillard’s famous printing shop with her manuscript, neither woman knows just how far the powerful elite will go to prevent the spread of Lysbette’s audacious ideas. 1952, NEW Milly Bennett is a lonely housewife struggling to find her way in her new neighborhood amidst the paranoid clamors of McCarthy’s America. She finds her life taking an unexpected turn when a relic from her past presents her with a 400-year-old manuscript to decipher, pulling her into a vortex of danger that threatens to shatter her world.

From the risky backstreets of sixteenth-century Paris to the unpredictable suburbs of mid-twentieth century New York, the stakes couldn’t be higher when, 400 years apart, Milly, Lysbette, and Charlotte each face a reality where the spread of ideas are feared and every effort is made to suppress them.

Dramatic and affecting, and inspired by the real-life encrypted Voynich manuscript, Book of Forbidden Words is both an engrossing story about a timeless struggle that echoes through the ages and a testament to the indomitable spirit of those who dare to let their words be heard.

My Opinion: This novel is built on the idea that the suppression of knowledge is never a relic of the past; it simply changes form. This is the second novel of hers I’ve read, and once again I was drawn in from the opening chapters. The story moves between 1552 Paris and 1952 Levittown, NY, told through three distinct perspectives: Milly Bennett, with her secret Bletchley Park background; Lysbette, an ex-nun who was raised in the household of Sir Thomas More; and Charlotte Guillard, an historical printer navigating a man’s world. And you know a reader is going to be locked in when a novel opens in a world of banned books, heretic hunters, and the fear of new ideas. Fein uses these dual timelines not as a structural trick, but as a way to show how quickly moral panic takes root, and how easily societies convince themselves that censorship is a form of safety.

What gives the novel its texture is the interplay between these women and the eras they inhabit. Milly’s wry reference to the PTA women as “the coven” sets the tone for her humor and exasperation, while Lysbette and Charlotte carry the weight of earlier battles over who gets to print, read, or even think freely. Fein grounds their stories in the history of sixteenth century book burnings, McCarthy era paranoia, the coded manuscript echoing the Voynich mystery, and the rigid conformity of postwar suburbia. My interest in the novel rose and dipped in waves, but by the end, I found myself appreciating both the women at its center and the meticulous research Fein brings to their worlds.

Fein brings these threads together with historical detail supporting the story rather than overwhelming it. While my attention shifted throughout, I ultimately respected the scope of what she set out to do and the women she chose, each navigating a world determined to limit what they can know, say, or preserve. By the final chapters, the novel became less about a single mysterious manuscript and more about the enduring struggle against censorship in all its forms. It’s a thoughtful, well researched work, and I’m glad to have spent time with the women whose stories Fein brought forward.

The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances

Title: The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances
Author: Glenn Dixon
Published: April 7, 2026 by Atria Books
Format: Kindle, 240 pages
Genre: Dystopian

Blurb: In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.

But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow sentient appliances discover that there are sinister forces in their midst. The omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, seeks to remove Harold from his home, a place he’s lived in for fifty years.

With the help of Adrian, a neighborhood boy who grows close to Scout and Harold, as well as Kate, Harold and Edie’s formerly estranged daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the all-controlling Grid lest they risk losing everything they hold dear.

My Opinion: This book completely caught me off guard. Yes, it’s written for adults, but my brain kept slipping into a kind of sad, dystopic Pixar mode—Man vs. Machine, but with heart, humor, and a surprising amount of soul. It’s a story about future spirals and fragile hope, and how something small and unexpected can save the humans they love.

Scout, the Roomba at the center of it all, is impossibly sweet and innocent in a way that makes you ache for her as she tries to make sense of the sudden sadness in her home. She’s a mechanical child, really, and somehow, she becomes the one who leads everyone else forward. You can’t help but root for her.

This is one of those books that’s nearly impossible to describe without sounding a little unhinged. You start to say, “Well, it’s about a man and his sentient appliances and how they confront the grid…oh, and there is a little boy trying to pass his piano finals,” and people blink at you like you’ve gone a bit too far. But once you’re inside the story, it makes perfect emotional sense. It’s full of heart, full of feeling, and yes, there may be a tear or two along the way.

You’ll never look at your smart appliances the same way again.

What surprised me most was how gently the novel braids together aging, grief, belonging, and the question of what it means to be conscious in a world run by impersonal systems. Through the companionship between a lonely man and the appliances that care for him, the book suggests that empathy, wherever it sparks, is the best form of resistance.

And just when you think you’ve figured out how their problems will be solved, Scout nudges you in a different direction. It wasn’t the ending I expected, but it was the one she knew how to reach. In her own quiet way, she earns her happily ever after: the ability to feel beauty, calm, and that tiny trick of the spirit we call joy.

This novel is strange, tender, and hopeful, and I loved the full experience.

Raising Hare: A Memoir

Title: Raising Hare: A Memoir
Author: Chloe Dalton
Published: March 4, 2025 by Pantheon
Format: Hardcover, 285 pages
Genre: Memoir

Blurb: Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.

In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare—a leveret—that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton’s house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon by foxes, stoats, feral cats, raptors, and even people, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death.

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness first-hand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.

My Opinion: I’ll admit it: my education is apparently lacking, because I had no idea there was a difference between a rabbit and a hare. Chloe Dalton set me straight on that within the first few pages, and from there, the book kept gently expanding my world in ways I didn’t expect.

This novel is slow, but intentionally so. It carries the same meditative stillness that settled over so many lives during the COVID shutdown. When someone who’s used to constant motion suddenly can’t travel, can’t rush, can’t outrun their own thoughts, what’s left is time. And into that quiet space, a tiny leveret arrives and changes everything.

This memoir isn’t about the grand arc of a life or a catalog of personal struggles. It’s about a moment; one suspended, tender season where a woman learns to move at the pace of a small, wild creature who trusts her without hesitation. It’s part memoir, part natural history, part animal husbandry, and somehow also a gentle reminder of what it feels like to breathe again. The slower rhythm of the writing mirrors the way Chloe herself slows down, shifting from a manic political adviser to someone capable of offering a calm, steady presence to a fragile animal.

Trying to explain this book to someone else is almost impossible. You end up saying, “It’s about a woman and a hare and… their coexistence,” and people stare at you like you’ve lost the plot. But they won’t understand until they read it. Until they feel the quiet trust, the unexpected beauty, the soft exhale that comes at the end.

For me, every bit of it worked. The history, the animal care, the emotional highs and lows all wove together into something quietly profound. It’s a book about noticing the world again, about the kind of connection that only happens when life finally slows enough for you to see it.

And I loved every minute.